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You can go to the most isolated towns on earth and you'll find people who speak English working in nearly any facility. You'll find signs in English even when y

You can go to the most isolated towns on earth and you'll find people who speak English working in nearly any facility. You'll find signs in English even when you're in the extremely rare case where nobody is speaking up and volunteering to help you in English. Needing to read the language before traveling is putting the cart before the horse. The vast majority of people don't get good at a language or even bother learning fundamentals until they're in a situation or region where the language is used. I've traveled with people who are (forgive me for the bad wording) equally as easily confused as your wife, if not worse, and into the middle of jungles and villages of far off places. In the 19th century this would've been extremely difficult and dangerous. In the 21st century, you're honestly probably safer wandering around cluelessly in more of the world than you are in the US. And I never felt like I was missing out by not being able to read a random thing in a language I don't know. Tourist locations, especially places like museums and historical sites, will almost always have full English translations of whatever the local language is. There's no "winging" it. You can plan for a country even when you don't know the language. Just save locations on google maps and go.

sdenton4 3y ago
When I was a young hacker, around 2002, I went for a couple weeks hike in the Greek mountains north of Delphi with little more than a map and a backpack. I wandered through a lot of tiny villages, slowly disappearing as the youth all moved to the cities. Each place o would show up and get led to The One Who Speaks English, and then have a truly unique conversation. In one village the English speaker was an American oil drilling engineer who changed course to become a philosophy professor, and then changed course again to live out his retirement in this tiny Greek mountain town. I really regret not staying longer there. In the next town, the English speaker was a guy who had left 30 years ago to work in the Canadian fishing industry, and only returned a week previously. He translated for a lot of the family elders, who were reaaally old and remembered doing the yearly pilgrimage on foot through the mountain passes. (Then I came to a town and chatted with a random person... When I described where I had been and where I was going, she crossed herself and begged me to turn back! Felt like a scene from a Dracula knock off...) And finally, I came to a very remote village, where I was housed by an Canadian woman who had lived in the village for like sixty years and forgotten all of her English! (Which was communicated through a combination of artifacts, drawing, and pantomime.) Which is to say, you've gotta get real far off the beaten path to find places where no one speaks English. And even then, people are helpful and fascinating.

sdenton4 3y ago

When I was a young hacker, around 2002, I went for a couple weeks hike in the Greek mountains north of Delphi with little more than a map and a backpack. I wandered through a lot of tiny villages, slowly disappearing as the youth all moved to the cities. Each place o would show up and get led to The One Who Speaks English, and then have a truly unique conversation. In one village the English speaker was an American oil drilling engineer who changed course to become a philosophy professor, and then changed course again to live out his retirement in this tiny Greek mountain town. I really regret not staying longer there. In the next town, the English speaker was a guy who had left 30 years ago to work in the Canadian fishing industry, and only returned a week previously. He translated for a lot of the family elders, who were reaaally old and remembered doing the yearly pilgrimage on foot through the mountain passes. (Then I came to a town and chatted with a random person... When I described where I had been and where I was going, she crossed herself and begged me to turn back! Felt like a scene from a Dracula knock off...) And finally, I came to a very remote village, where I was housed by an Canadian woman who had lived in the village for like sixty years and forgotten all of her English! (Which was communicated through a combination of artifacts, drawing, and pantomime.) Which is to say, you've gotta get real far off the beaten path to find places where no one speaks English. And even then, people are helpful and fascinating.